


Second Chance

by blissfulRaconteur



Category: Homestuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-28
Updated: 2011-11-28
Packaged: 2017-10-26 15:23:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/284831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blissfulRaconteur/pseuds/blissfulRaconteur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the ashes of a dead universe, you breathe your last. But that's not the end of the story.</p><p>[sburb rp setting idea]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Second Chance

One by one, your best friends left you.

Linnore was taken apart by ogres. Never should have picked FEATHERKIND, it didn't do him a lick of good. If he hadn't been your moirail, it would have been funny - feathers and blood everywhere, his manic, dying laughter echoing through the cliffs of his world.

Jeskott died fighting his denizen. He thought he had gone back and forth enough that he could take her. He thought he could just reverse himself out of anything. You found the tips of his horns. The denizen left them behind for you. That was nice of her.

Frenlan thought she had figured out how to go god-tier. Pity she never made it to her quest bed before the Derseite assassin took care of her. Two stab wounds in the back and one in the neck - overkill, goddamn overkill. She had been so gentle.

And you.

The reckoning happened just like your kernelsprite said it would. Skaia burned. Your world burned. Prospit and Derse burned. You became used to the smell of pitch and smoldering wood as you trudged through the ashes of your dead universe, looking for a way home, improbable as that might be. You had seen Alternia burn, too; seen your lusus jump in front of the meteor that was heading for the hive, giving you the precious seconds you needed to enter the game. You miss him. You miss your friends.

But time goes on. You scratch a meager existence from the ruins of alchemizers and the corpses of prospitians and dersites - nobody left to judge you anymore, nobody to see. The fires fade, and then go out, leaving only darkness. You tell time by the stars - but the stars are going out, too. Sometimes you hear voices - whispers in a language that you barely understand but terrify you all the same. 

You survive, but the food is beginning to run out. You think it may have been a whole sweep since the reckoning, but you're not sure anymore. Surviving is what you were good at. Nothing fancy. Nothing fun. The others had real skills. Jeskott had been a hell of musician. You still carry around his lusal harp, a stringed thing that you can't even play. Frenlan would have been a really incredible artist. She had the talent, but she was convinced that she was destined for failure. No self-confidence. Linnore was a natural leader, the guy who knew what you were thinking just by looking at you. He had those quiet, calm eyes - odd for a troll to have eyes like his - that _pierced_ you, got you talking, babbling, a torrent of words and feelings, secrets that you had never told _anyone_ rushing out of your mouth like they were burning your tongue.

On the night of your death, you look up and realize that there's only one star left in the sky. You don't know what that means, but you can hear the voices again, clearly now, and though you don't understand the words, their meaning is perfectly clear.

 _We are reclaiming this one._

 __

 _We are sorry._

And you're sorry too. And you're tired - _so tired_ , the food has been gone for the better part of a month and you think you're just going to close your eyes for a moment, just a moment, you're exhausted but when you wake up you'll move on, you'll find something else to keep you going. You'll survive. You pull the blanket up around your chin. If you had been awake, you would have noticed with concern the deathly pallor of your skin, watched as your remaining breaths entered the single digits, seen the almost grotesque thinness of your abdomen. You would have put it all together. 

But you are asleep.

You dream. This one is not like your other dreams. You have no visions of the furthest ring, no creeping horrors, no memories of your friends. You see the star above you - the very last star - streaking across the night sky like a comet. You hear a laugh, and the night sky parts, and the star takes your hand. "Hold tight," it says. "I have you." You can't speak, but you wrap your arms around her waist and bury your face in her black coat and spill noiseless tears across the sky, and then the darkness parts. You see light. Light so bright that it burns your eyes. You hear yourself cry out, raising an arm to shield your eyes from the sun-

-and you wake up on the cold floor of your hive, daylight streaming through the window.

It takes you a moment to reorient yourself. Your hive had definitely been destroyed - the reckoning had turned it into flinders and ash. You remember that. You saw it. You were _there._ And yet, here you are.

The scene outside your window is even stranger. Great pointed towers of obsidian lick the sky, looking for all the world like the teeth of an immense beast. You hear a low, mournful melody on the breeze - or is the breeze making the melody? You can't tell. You wonder, briefly, if every single species you had ever heard of had gotten the afterlife wrong.

Until you see Skaia.

You gape openmouthed at the blue and white planet hanging there, motionless, in defiance of all logic and good sense. Skaia did not belong there. Skaia had been extinguished with the rest of your universe, had broken apart like a cracked egg. You swear under your breath. Then, realizing that there's no one around to hear you, you swear aloud, and then you're screaming them, running across the grassy plains in front of your hive, shouting obscenities upward. You are confused and angry and more than a little scared.

But you are alive.

And soon, you will meet the others like you. Their stories are not so dissimilar from yours - dead universes. Doomed sessions. Troubled sleep. And a savior in the night whom no one can remember aside from a hazy recollection, like waking up from a dream. Soon the memory will fade entirely. What is clear to everyone is this:

You have been given another chance.

You resolve not to waste it.


End file.
